BBC - Ethics - Animal ethics: Experimenting on animals (2024)

Animal experimentation

A difficult issue

In 1997 Dr Jay Vacanti and his team grew an ear on the back of a mouse

Animal experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to test the safety of other products.

Many of these experiments cause pain to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other ways.

If it is morally wrong to cause animals to suffer then experimenting on animals produces serious moral problems.

Animal experimenters are very aware of this ethical problem and acknowledge that experiments should be made as humane as possible.

They also agree that it's wrong to use animals if alternative testing methods would produce equally valid results.

Two positions on animal experiments

• In favour of animal experiments:
• Experimenting on animals is acceptable if (and only if):
  • suffering is minimised in all experiments
  • human benefits are gained which could not be obtained by using other methods
• Against animal experiments:
• Experimenting on animals is always unacceptable because:
  • it causes suffering to animals
  • the benefits to human beings are not proven
  • any benefits to human beings that animal testing does provide could be produced in other ways

Harm versus benefit

The case for animal experiments is that they will produce such great benefits for humanity that it is morally acceptable to harm a few animals.

The equivalent case against is that the level of suffering and the number of animals involved are both so high that the benefits to humanity don't provide moral justification.

The three Rs

The three Rs are a set of principles that scientists are encouraged to follow in order to reduce the impact of research on animals.

The three Rs are: Reduction, Refinement, Replacement.

• Reduction:
• Reducing the number of animals used in experiments by:
  • Improving experimental techniques
  • Improving techniques of data analysis
  • Sharing information with other researchers
• Refinement:
• Refining the experiment or the way the animals are cared for so as to reduce their suffering by:
  • Using less invasive techniques
  • Better medical care
  • Better living conditions
• Replacement:
• Replacing experiments on animals with alternative techniques such as:
  • Experimenting on cell cultures instead of whole animals
  • Using computer models
  • Studying human volunteers
  • Using epidemiological studies

Drug safety

Animal experiments and drug safety

Scientists say that banning animal experiments would mean either

• an end to testing new drugs or
• using human beings for all safety tests

Animal experiments are not used to show that drugs are safe and effective in human beings - they cannot do that. Instead, they are used to help decide whether a particular drug should be tested on people.

Animal experiments eliminate some potential drugs as either ineffective or too dangerous to use on human beings. If a drug passes the animal test it's then tested on a small human group before large scale clinical trials.

The pharmacologist William D H Carey demonstrated the importance of animal testing in a letter to the British Medical Journal:

Are animal experiments useful?

Are animal experiments useful?

Animal experiments only benefit human beings if their results are valid and can be applied to human beings.

Not all scientists are convinced that these tests are valid and useful.

The moral status of the experimenters

Animal rights extremists often portray those who experiment on animals as being so cruel as to have forfeited any own moral standing.

But the argument is about whether the experiments are morally right or wrong. The general moral character of the experimenter is irrelevant.

What is relevant is the ethical approach of the experimenter to each experiment. John P Gluck has suggested that this is often lacking:

Gluck offers this advice for people who may need to experiment on animals:

Animal experiments and animal rights

The issue of animal experiments is straightforward if we accept that animals have rights: if an experiment violates the rights of an animal, then it is morally wrong, because it is wrong to violate rights.

The possible benefits to humanity of performing the experiment are completely irrelevant to the morality of the case, because rights should never be violated (except in obvious cases like self-defence).

And as one philosopher has written, if this means that there are some things that humanity will never be able to learn, so be it.

This bleak result of deciding the morality of experimenting on animals on the basis of rights is probably why people always justify animal experiments on consequentialist grounds; by showing that the benefits to humanity justify the suffering of the animals involved.

Justifying animal experiments

Those in favour of animal experiments say that the good done to human beings outweighs the harm done to animals.

This is a consequentialist argument, because it looks at the consequences of the actions under consideration.

It can't be used to defend all forms of experimentation since there are some forms of suffering that are probably impossible to justify even if the benefits are exceptionally valuable to humanity.

Ethical arithmetic

Animal experiments and ethical arithmetic

The consequentialist justification of animal experimentation can be demonstrated by comparing the moral consequences of doing or not doing an experiment.

This process can't be used in a mathematical way to help people decide ethical questions in practice, but it does demonstrate the issues very clearly.

The basic arithmetic

If performing an experiment would cause more harm than not performing it, then it is ethically wrong to perform that experiment.

The harm that will result from not doing the experiment is the result of multiplying three things together:

• the moral value of a human being
• the number of human beings who would have benefited
• the value of the benefit that each human being won't get

The harm that the experiment will cause is the result of multiplying together:

• the moral value of an experimental animal
• the number of animals suffering in the experiment
• the negative value of the harm done to each animal

But it isn't that simple because:

• it's virtually impossible to assign a moral value to a being
• it's virtually impossible to assign a value to the harm done to each individual
• the harm that will be done by the experiment is known beforehand, but the benefit is unknown
• the harm done by the experiment is caused by an action, while the harm resulting from not doing it is caused by an omission

Certain versus potential harm

In the theoretical sum above, the harm the experiment will do to animals is weighed against the harm done to humans by not doing the experiment.

But these are two conceptually different things.

• The harm that will be done to the animals is certain to happen if the experiment is carried out
• The harm done to human beings by not doing the experiment is unknown because no-one knows how likely the experiment is to succeed or what benefits it might produce if it did succeed

So the equation is completely useless as a way of deciding whether it is ethically acceptable to perform an experiment, because until the experiment is carried out, no-one can know the value of the benefit that it produces.

And there's another factor missing from the equation, which is discussed in the next section.

Acts and omissions

The equation doesn't deal with the moral difference between acts and omissions.

Most ethicists think that we have a greater moral responsibility for the things we do than for the things we fail to do; i.e. that it is morally worse to do harm by doing something than to do harm by not doing something.

For example: we think that the person who deliberately drowns a child has done something much more wrong than the person who refuses to wade into a shallow pool to rescue a drowning child.

In the animal experiment context, if the experiment takes place, the experimenter will carry out actions that harm the animals involved.

If the experiment does not take place the experimenter will not do anything. This may cause harm to human beings because they won't benefit from a cure for their disease because the cure won't be developed.

So the acts and omissions argument could lead us to say that

• it is morally worse for the experimenter to harm the animals by experimenting on them
• than it is to (potentially) harm some human beings by not doing an experiment that might find a cure for their disease.

And so if we want to continue with the arithmetic that we started in the section above, we need to put an additional, and different, factor on each side of the equation to deal with the different moral values of acts and omissions.

Other approaches

Other approaches to animal experiments

One writer suggests that we can cut out a lot of philosophising about animal experiments by using this test:

Sadly, there are a number of examples where researchers have been prepared to experiment on human beings in ways that should not have been permitted on animals.

And another philosopher suggests that it would anyway be more effective to research on normal human beings:

If those human subjects were normal and able to give free and informed consent to the experiment then this might not be morally objectionable.

Proposed EU directive

Proposed EU directive

In November 2008 the European Union put forward proposals to revise the directive for the protection of animals used in scientific experiments in line with the three R principle of replacing, reducing and refining the use of animals in experiments. The proposals have three aims:

• to considerably improve the welfare of animals used in scientific procedures
• to ensure fair competition for industry
• to boost research activities in the European Union

The proposed directive covers all live non-human vertebrate animals intended for experiments plus certain other species likely to experience pain, and also animals specifically bred so that their organs or tissue can be used in scientific procedures.

The main changes proposed are:

• to make it compulsory to carry out ethical reviews and require that experiments where animals are used be subject to authorisation
• to widen the scope of the directive to include specific invertebrate species and foetuses in their last trimester of development and also larvae and other animals used in basic research, education and trainingto set minimum housing and care requirements
• to require that only animals of second or older generations be used, subject to transitional periods, to avoid taking animals from the wild and exhausting wild populations
• to state that alternatives to testing on animals must be used when available and that the number of animals used in projects be reduced to a minimum
• to require member states to improve the breeding, accommodation and care measures and methods used in procedures so as to eliminate or reduce to a minimum any possible pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm caused to animals

The proposal also introduces a ban on the use of great apes - chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans - in scientific procedures, other than in exceptional circ*mstances, but there is no proposal to phase out the use of other non-human primates in the immediate foreseeable future.